Rita Konig Advice. We take a look at the portfolio of interior designer and House and Garden columnist Rita Konig. Discover the best interior designers on HOUSE.

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Friday 13 January 2017

Rita Konig is a self-professed lover of clutter and pattern, and her signature style is a blend of English comfort and American sleekness. Every month she imparts wisdom in her House & Garden column Rita Notes - from wallpapers to ironmongery, see the full range of Rita's expertise here. After living in New York for six years, the designer is now based in London, running her website, writing columns and designing for clients.

'Be bold. There is no point in wallpapering a room and being shy about it. This beautiful Pierre Frey was perfect for Stella and Dot founder Blythe Harris' California home, which I worked on with architect G.P. Schafer.'

The sitting area is a masterclass in layering, with textiles in different patterns and textures covering the sofas and cushions; Etro's red cotton velvet 'Palinuro' from Pierre Frey is used on one sofa and China Seas' 'Ziggurat' from Tissus d'Hélène on the other. The open fireplace surrounded by a chimneypiece found at Petworth Antique Centre, and walls covered with a mix of framed prints, photographs, drawings and paintings, add to the relaxed look.

Rita Konig is not a woman who is afraid to speak her mind. Reassuringly opinionated on anything from cut-pile carpet (loathsome) to kitchen sinks (should never be visible from the sitting room), she administers her design dictums with a confidence and certainty quite at odds with her easy-going, almost girlish manner. She is at once a style commentator - as European editor for T: The New York Times Style Magazine - and a design agony aunt, dispatching regular, compulsive decorating advice to readers of House & Garden through her column, 'Rita Notes'. The daughter of design royalty Nina Campbell, she has been brought up on good taste, and is herself a decorator in high demand on both sides of the Atlantic, with current projects including a US hotel refit and a London townhouse.

Returning to London from New York in 2012, having spent six years there honing her signature crisp-yet-cosy decorating style, Rita originally intended to create the perfect home for herself as single girl about town. On buying the flat, she set her mind to remodelling its interior to house a small kitchen and large entertaining space. 'The whole thing seemed to take forever,' she says, curling her feet under herself on a vintage sofa covered in crimson velvet. 'But just after I moved in, I met Phil [the biographer Philip Eade], and then I was married and pregnant. I just couldn't face moving again, so the first call I made was to the woman next door to ask if we could buy her flat.'

A few steps up from the kitchen leads to the dining area, where the walls are painted in 'Greville Pink' by Adam Bray. Contrasting with this are the yellow leather-upholstered chairs from Philippe Hurel and a drawing by Bill Mauldin from Honor Fraser Gallery in LA.

After months of negotiations, the sale went through, the builders went back in, and a lateral conversion, which created space for a further two bedrooms and a dressing room, was completed. The couple moved in in November 2014, with Margot, who - fast asleep during my visit - had been born the previous February.

Hinson's 'Martinique' lines the walls of the bathroom in Rita Konig's own London flat.

This is a meticulously planned and carefully executed project. Rita shrugs at the compliment. 'What I am interested in is how you live in a space, and how to be comfortable. I am constantly striving to create that comfortable room that I once stayed in, and often it's as simple as wanting to sit down and have somewhere to put your drink and a light to read your book by. It has been interesting decorating for myself as I don't do it in the same way that I do for clients, where I make a presentation and work it all out. Things have just sort of appeared and the space has evolved.'

Masses of walk-in storage space, plus an enviable laundry and additional bathroom in the basement, make this a highly functional, enviably modern family home. 'If you don't have good storage, your life is a mess. It is expensive, and people don't like to put it into their budgets, but it's crucial,' says Rita. When asked how she did it all, she reels off a long list; this includes losing 12cm off the length of the sitting area to make room for the full-length bath in the bathroom and buying land from fellow freeholders to extend the flat into the garden to make room for the dining area.

Playing on the lack of natural light in the bathroom, Rita had the bath area covered in horizontal and vertical boards, painted in a high-gloss 'Deep Brunswick Green' from Papers and Paints.

Both the sofas in the sitting room are surrounded by intense collages of framed pictures and prints. Behind, a passageway leads to the more intimate parts of the flat: a bathroom hung with palm-leaf 'Martinique' wallpaper from Hinson, a spare room and study, a dressing room and, ultimately, a serene main bedroom with an adjoining nursery.

Friendly and remarkably practical, the small kitchen has very simple, Corian-topped units designed by Rita, and functions as a buffer between the street and the cocooning comforts of the rest of the flat. Up a small step and we are in the open-plan dining and sitting room, the kitchen neatly out of sight but within easy reach. 'I find the kitchen - and where people choose to position it in a house - very interesting,' Rita muses. 'Women, having spent years fighting their way out of them, are now manacling themselves to these enormous kitchen islands, while their children sit in the drawing room playing computer games. I still have a sense of open plan without ever having to look at the kitchen sink.'

In the main bedroom, Rita sourced 'acres of C & C Milano wool' for generous curtains and chose Farrow & Ball's 'Skylight' paint for the walls.

Visitors to Rita's flat must enter from the street through a door into an unexpected and exquisite garden (she describes her bed of box balls as one of her 'best investments'). 'It was when I realised that I could give this flat its own entrance through the garden that the property started to get exciting,' she says. When living in New York, all her apartments opened straight into the kitchen and she wanted to continue the look in London. 'This seemed to work very well coming off the garden, just like houses in the country where there is almost always a door to the garden from the kitchen. And it is very jolly for when people come over for dinner, and when arriving with shopping bags.'

Originally Rita's room before the expansion, the spare room has curtains in 'Broadcloth' felt from Hainsworth and is lined in Tyler Hall's 'First Bloom' wallpaper from Tissus d'Hélène, with a Guatemalan tapestry that Phil brought back from his travels.

'We did what we could in a short time,' says Rita of the lateral conversion. 'We have everything we wanted. I love sitting here and looking out at the garden. It gives you such a sense of space and the more I go to other people's houses, the more I think that lateral is the way we ought to live. People are spending so much money on these vertical houses. I have friends with houses worth millions and they spend their whole time in the kitchen in the basement. Not having stairs when Margot was crawling was amazing. It was like being in an enormous hotel suite, where no one has to go downstairs in the middle of the night to get the milk.'

In a new venture, she has started hosting workshops from her home in west London, inspiring groups of paying guests with her own blend of design wisdom, instruction and sourcebook secrets. A perfectly natural departure for this mine of maxims, the workshops use her garden flat as an example of how to get it right.

In the sitting area, two armchairs, passed down from Rita's mother and grandmother, are positioned to distinguish the two spaces; the left one is covered in 'Casse-Noisette' by Décors Barbares and the right has a similar floral pattern on the cushion.

When Rita arrived at the Manhattan townhouse, she immediately found the interior plan verging on stark. The owner had warned her that she did not want pattern, but Rita thought this was negotiable and here and there has added toned-down patterns and rich colours, like the deep green of this stair runner.

The stairs lead directly from the sitting room up to the first floor. The Rug Company runner complements the dark wooden flooring.

It did not look like a match made in heaven: two people with diametrically opposed tastes. And how risky, when the two people are the owner of a house and the interior designer hired to work on it. Rita is a self-professed lover of 'clutter and pattern', but the American owner of this Manhattan townhouse describes herself as 'a clean-lined minimalist'.

Accessed through sliding pocket doors, the dining room has a Philippe Hurel table combined with chairs from Howe. The neutral palette of the walls, painted beams and Luke Irwin rug places the focus on the arched french windows, which open out onto the garden. Rita created a seating area by the chimneypiece with a compact sofa.

Rita's love for 'clutter' influences this wall filled with framed prints and photographs. The more minimalist taste of the clients is catered to with the neutral, toned-down colour scheme of the picture collection.

Fortuny 'Persiano' cotton, now discontinued, was used to make the blinds for the three large windows in the sitting room. Having discovered Jacques Adnet through Rita, the owner now has a piece by the French designer in almost every room - here it is a pair of round tables. The Clifford Ross picture above the chimneypiece was bought at New York gallery Sonnabend.

'When you don't have a fabulous art collection, think of doing something totally different. When I moved to NY, I had no pictures and no budget. I covered my chimney breast with a grid of polaroid photographs of my friends, family and trips.'

'Never be afraid of hanging pictures and paraphernalia to a patterned wallpaper. I loved, loved, loved my bedroom in this flat papered in Cole and Son's 'Madras Violet'. Sometimes I would just lie on my bed and stare at the walls.'

'When you can't afford to make the curtains in the fabric you really want, re-think the way you use it. Here, we packed a punch with this table cloth in Robert Kime's 'Bergama' while keeping the rest of the room very calm in Paint Library 'Lead II'.'

'If you're nervous of wallpaper, use it somewhere you are fleetingly. I used this stylish print - another by Twigs in LA - for the powder room of Deborah Needleman and Jacob Weisberg's place in Garrison, New York.'

'Don't worry about getting bored of wallpaper. The stronger it is, the more you will love it everyday. I never tired of this print by my mother Nina Campbell that I used in my New York apartment. It gave a pokey non-existent hall real definition.'